


Timefall

by corvobiancos



Category: Death Stranding (Video Games), Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Discovery/Death Stranding
Genre: Gen, author also had this idea at 2 am so is this REALLY a good idea, author binged discovery in like a week and started a new DS playtrough so yeah, author thought “what if star trek......but make it survival horror’ so that’s what this is, don’t worry the major character death thing is just for a red shirt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-10
Updated: 2020-09-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:00:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26395288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corvobiancos/pseuds/corvobiancos
Summary: The USS Discovery responds to a distress signal from a Class M planet where the rain rapidly ages all organic life upon contact, and erodes all non-organic matter exponentially faster than normal.The only crossing over between Star Trek and Death Stranding is the use of timefall and BTs as concepts. Otherwise, just think of this fic as a monster-of-the-week episode!
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> I kind of threw in an OC because this is an excerpt from a self-indulgent thing I was already writing, and I didn’t feel like doing a half-rewrite just to take her out so you’re stuck with her!
> 
> It’s also been a hot minute since I wrote something ACTUALLY spooky so don’t judge me too hard please.

“Now would be a great time to have that amplifier online, commander!” Captain Pike shouted over his shoulder, tossing one of their precious few sonic grenades into the corridor.

“WORKING ON IT!” Burnham shouted back. She was frantically wiring and rewiring the innards of one of the signal amplifier pylons, and those...things were just inching closer and closer. The only thing that seemed to hold them back were the sonic grenades that the captain and security officer were lobbing into each corridor, and they were almost out of those.

Mara, their xenoanthropologist, was doing whatever she could to help bring the pylons online but as Burnham expected, the woman’s expertise in alien cultures was next to useless when it came to jury-rigging a beacon to beam back to the Discovery. Every time Burnham glanced up at her, Mara’s face became more and more distraught. She called out, “I'm a xenoanthropologist, not engineer, Chris!”

“Just keep doing something until the dish opens!” Michael shouted. That was kind of what she was doing, but she still had some idea of how to get them to work. More of an idea than Lieutenant Fisher did.

Those two pylons were the only two that still needed fixing, but of course that seemed to make them impossible to repair. There was always something about impending death that made simple tasks like these take an eternity.

“Mara, move!” Burnham called out as soon as her pylon beeped, signaling it was operational. With no time to celebrate, she dove to help Mara with hers. The other woman stole a couple of grenades off of Burnham’s belt and joined the captain in holding back those...things.

Right as Burnham spliced a few wires together, a large, inky handprint appeared on the ground beside her. In the same instant the pylon came online. “Got it!” she shouted.

“Pike to Discovery; get us the hell out of here!”


	2. Roanoke

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just some “calm before the storm” stuff.

“Lights on; thirty percent. Good morning, Commander Burnham.”

Michael awoke to the lights in her shared quarters warmly illuminating the room; a simulated sunrise. She took a moment to stretch in bed, noticing that Tilly was already gone. Michael pushed herself out of bed, finding it a bit hard that morning to muster up the energy to go through her routine.

She pulled her standard-issue undershirt over her head and muttered, “Computer, what time is it?”

“The time is oh six hundred and thirteen hours.”

Earlier than she thought. She still had some time to grab a bite to eat before it was time for her shift up on the bridge.

"Wait..."

Michael watched Tilly squint at something over the former's shoulder, but when Michael moved to join her, Tilly blurt out, "Are those Belgian waffles? I thought only commanding officers got those replicator codes?"

She peered over her shoulder to see Captain Pike and Lieutenant Mara Fisher together in the corner of the mess hall. The two of them laughed over something, and Mara flashed the captain a bright, toothy smile that contrasted with the darkness of her hair.

"Maybe the captain was just being generous," Michael said, turning back to face Tilly, "She and Commander Nhan were the only other Enterprise officers that transferred over to the Discovery; it's hard getting used to a new ship and a new crew."

“She's up on the bridge with you, right? What’s she like?”

Michael shrugged. "I haven't spoken to her much outside the bridge. All I know is that she used to work in museums an archivist on Earth before the joined Starfleet, so the captain's had her parsing and categorizing the Sphere data with Airiam's help ever since we received it."

"Makes sense," Tilly mused.

They continued their breakfast, chatting about anything and everything, until suddenly Tilly perked up and stared over Michael’s shoulder again.

“…What?” Michael eyed the other woman, confused.

“I’m gonna to talk to her!” Tilly jumped to her feet. The captain had hardly even left the mess hall and she was already halfway to sitting with Mara at the latter’s table with her tray in hand. Still not quite ready to head up to the bridge yet, Michael soon joined them.

Mara’s eyes widened as they had a seat with her, and she said, “Oh!” She glanced between Michael and Tilly, “…Uh…Hi there.”

Tilly replied, “Heard you were working on the data that Sphere gave us.”

“Uh-huh,” Mara nodded, "The Disco's computer's translated it all already, but it’s still a lot to categorize, so I’m sorry if I’ve been distant.”

Michael nodded. “If the data is already translated, why are you bothering to categorize it?”

“The translation the computer gave us is kind of like having a history professor talk at you for thousands of hours at once. It jumped around a lot to add context to different events so I’ve begun to code an algorithm to place everything on a timeline; make it easier to search the archive when you want to know something specific. That way Federation historians might have a bit of an easier time studying it in the future.” Mara grinned from ear to ear as she sipped her coffee, "There are probably going to be hundreds of species that came and went that no one ever even knew about until now."

Beyond that, Mara was not one to talk much about herself. During the rest of their meal, the only new thing Michael learned about Mara was that she had only been serving on the Enterprise for about a year before Spock's disappearance.

“...I was going stir-crazy in spacedock,” Mara said with another smile, “So the moment the captain asked me if I wanted to transfer to the Discovery I was already packed up and on my way to the transporter room.” She shrugged, finishing her last bite of food.

“Commander Burnham and Lieutenant Fisher to the bridge immediately,” the P.A. system echoed above them.

“Sorry to cut your breakfast short,” Captain Pike greeted them, “Bryce intercepted a distress call nearby. Discovery is already en route, but I wanna know what we’re warping into. Coordinates were encoded into the transmission.”

Michael nodded and got to work.

“Fisher, check the Sphere data; see what you can find, too.”

“Aye, sir.”

Michael plugged the coordinates into her station. "Starfleet's database lists the planet as Class M; uninhabited until recently," she called out, scrolling through the file, "A small colony ship called the SS Roanoke set out to colonize the planet eight months ago. No one’s heard from them since they first reported landing on the surface...until this distress call."

As soon as she stopped speaking, she lifted her head and saw Mara groan from across the bridge: "What?"

"Something you wanna say, lieutenant?" the captain turned his chair to face Mara's workstation.

Mara was pinching the bridge of her nose. She replied through a laugh, "Is no one else seeing the irony here?" She looked around the bridge, and no one responded.

Come to think of it, the name Roanoke did sound a bit familiar to Michael, but she couldn't quite place where she knew it from. However, she didn't have to try to remember too much, as Mara soon explained, "Roanoke was the first English colony in North America on Earth, but it supposedly disappeared into thin air before Jamestown was settled. The colony was completely gone, with the only clue being the word 'croatoan' etched into a tree."

"Guess history degrees are useful after all," Captain Pike replied, "...So this is like naming a cruise ship the Titanic."

Michael caught Mara chuckling to herself before the latter nodded. "Exactly, sir. I hope everyone in this Roanoke is okay, of course, but..." She trailed off, shaking her head, "I dunno. I've got a bad feeling about this, captain."

The Discovery finally arrived at the coordinates attached to the distress signal, the bow of the ship pointed directly at the planet as it exited warp. It looked similar to Earth at first glance, but the continents had rougher edges and overall were significantly less verdant than Earth's. "Burnham, report," the captain ordered.

"Aye, captain." Michael began an initial scan of the planet, soon calling out her findings: "Just as the database said: hospitable atmosphere for human life. There's a small settlement on the surface...But I'm getting some kind of interference in the atmosphere that's blocking scans for life signs across most of the planet, sir."

"Can we get any closer, Detmer?"

"Not without entering the upper atmosphere, captain."

"How about images from the surface? Any landing zones?" Pike brainstormed aloud, and while Burnham was focusing their scanners on the location of the settlement she heard him call out, "Fisher, what’s the Sphere got?"

Mara responded, "Not much more than what Commander Burnham already said, sir. According to the Sphere's records..." she trailed off for a moment, then blurt out, "There were only two other attempts to colonize the planet, but those were tens of thousands of years before the Federation was even formed."

"Which means there should be artifacts, ruins, fossils—" Michael replied, "—But I'm not seeing any remnants of any civilization other than Roanoke on our sensors." Upon closer inspection, she didn't even see where the SS Roanoke landed in the first place. Her scans finally turned up images, which she immediately transferred to the primary viewscreen. An overlay appeared, showing rusted, hollowed out husks of two empty structures and the remains of a terraforming replicator on a dark, arid plain. There were no signs of an attack, either. Nothing about this didn’t seem to add up.

"Is that it?" Pike said, his brow furrowing. He stood from the captain's chair and stepped toward the viewscreen, hoping to see more detail. "Saru," he continued, "You see anything?"

After a moment, Saru said, "No, sir. The atmospheric interference has made the image resolution too low to see much more from here."

Eyes fixed on the viewscreen, Mara mused, "...There is no possible way that those things are only eight months old."

Burnham looked back down at her station, which told her that remote dating scans put the structures at...

No. This wasn't possible.

"Commander Burnham?" she heard Pike say.

She blinked a few times. "Scans are putting those structures at...three thousand years old."

There was a moment of silence on the bridge, save for a few of the other officers muttering to themselves in disbelief. Captain Pike said carefully, "...Prep a landing party. Burnham, Fisher; with me. Let's see what the hell's going on down there."


	3. Stepping Stones

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The away team beams to Roanoke’s surface, and quickly realizes that this place is fifty shades of fucked up.

The first thing that hit Michael when they beamed down was the smell—the rich, earthy scent that fills the air when it rains. It would have been a wonderful smell if it weren’t for the next thing she noticed: The entire region was completely barren, just as her preliminary scans had shown. The colony couldn’t have farmed anything there if they tried.

When Michael looked forward, she saw that the settlement was about a hundred yards away from where the team stood. Beyond that, there was nothing but rolling, mossy hills and a neutral grey sky. Captain Pike led them onward, saying, “All we have from this place was a general distress beacon; no details about what’s happening, so who knows what’s waiting for us out there. Set phasers to stun and keep your eyes open.”

“Aye, sir,” the other two replied, a little chorus of beeps sounding as they did as ordered.

The ground was uneven as they walked, littered with pebbles and stones that shifted beneath every footstep. The planet was beautiful, albeit in a morose way.

“Weird…All these stones like pumice…” Mara mused, her voice barely audible. Michael looked her direction she saw the woman turning a stone over in her hand before offering it to Pike to have a look. Michael knelt down carefully, realizing that Mara was right, but the pores made them look more like swiss cheese than pumice. That was ignoring the fact that they were nowhere near any volcanic activity.

Back on the bridge, Mara had said that the Sphere had only known of two other settlements on this planet, but there was no evidence anyone but Roanoke was even there. The only structures on the surface were what they had seen on the viewscreen on the bridge.

What happened to those other colonies? Why didn’t they have any fossils; any ruins left behind after they died out?

Wind howled through one of the structures as Michael approached it, and it was immediately clear that there was more going on than hey had seen from the bridge. Inside there was a sealed hatch in the ground, meaning the rest of the settlement was subterranean, and what they were seeing were rudimentary airlocks...Which were no longer very useful now that they were falling apart. She heard the captain call out moments later about finding the same kind of hatch in the other building. As much as she wanted to go down below to find out what had happened, something in the back of her mind was telling her that staying with the other two was the better decision.

As she moved to meet the captain and lieutenant outside, Michael saw the latter studying the industrial replicator that stood between the airlocks. Mara looked around the area, saying to no one in particular, “They had their work cut out for them. Why didn’t they settle down along a river or something? That’s like…Settling 101.”

“Because there _are_ no rivers,” Michael answered, “The only bodies of water our sensors picked up were the oceans.”

Mara furrowed her brow. “That doesn’t make any sense. Did these people see the ‘Class M’ and not actually scan the planet first?”

Michael raised a brow at her and almost explained that there was little to no data that had come up on her scans up on the Discovery, but was interrupted.

“Normally I’d appreciate your sense of humor, lieutenant,” Pike appeared around the back of the replicator looking more solemn than usual, “But now’s really not the time.”

Averting her gaze, Mara pressed her lips into a thin line and said quietly, “Sorry, sir.”

He continued softly, “…Follow me.”

The captain led them to the other airlock, where Michael immediately saw what he was talking about: There was a body wearing an environmental suit sprawled out from the building, but after getting closer she saw that one hand was reaching out into the dirt; reaching for help.

Mara froze, eyes fixed on the corpse. “…Oh…god.”

Michael continued past her, reading the insignias on the EV suit as being from…Roanoke? Before she was even close enough to kneel beside it for a more thorough investigation, she saw that all that remained of the outstretched hand were the bones.

She heard Captain Pike say behind her, "What've you got over there, commander?"

Where to start? "The stage of decay is consistent with a them being out here for a few years...if you ignore the Roanoke insignias on their suit, sir."

“Um...” Mara said softly, “...Did either of you see that?”

Michael looked over her shoulder, up at Mara. The other woman’s eyes were fixed on something but when Michael looked out the same way, all she saw was one of the hills corralling the area into a shallow valley.

“...I guess my brain was playing tricks on me,” Mara trailed off, but when Michael glanced back at her again, her expression betrayed her. Face white as a sheet, Mara stepped languidly around Michael to look at the other side of the body, where the head was turned. Michael looked back at her in time to see Mara let out a disgusted groan and averted her gaze.

"Fisher, are you alright?" She moved to join Mara.

The other woman pointed at the corpse, turning her back to it. Michael naturally followed where she was pointing. She just meant to glance at it, but couldn't look away for a moment. Despite the skeletal hand reaching out, the face still had flesh. Desiccated and leathery, but still there. There was no logical reason that the hand would have decayed so much faster than the rest of the body, other than the fact that the hand wasn't covered by the EV suit.

As far as she knew, the atmosphere was similar to Earth's, hence its classification. No acid rain. No other elements in the air that would accelerate decay like this.

"I've never..." Mara began, "I've never actually...y'know...seen a...dead body before?...But I don't think that's how they're supposed to look..." She made a sound as if she were holding back vomit.

The captain took a breath and knelt down beside the body for his own analysis while Michael turned her attention back toward Mara, whose dark, curly hair obscured her face as she kept her eyes on her feet. Michael gently rest a hand on the other woman's shoulder and opened her mouth to speak, but Mara spoke up instead:

"I uh..." she stood straight, looking paler than normal, "I know it's stupid, but...I think this was a mistake. Coming down here."

"There should be some tunnels beneath us with their living quarters. Maybe there’s still some—"

Mara shook her head. "You're not..." She let out a long breath and murmured, "...I don't—This place feels wrong."

The captain's communicator trilled. "Pike to Discovery: We've found a casualty down here, but we're about to go inside to see if there are any survivors."

Silence, which made Mara’s eyes nearly pop out of her skull.

"You said there was atmospheric interference, Burnham?"

"Yes, sir. Maybe the colony had a signal amplifier stored somewhere inside. If it's not operational, that may be why no one has heard from them."

"Let's hope so, because that might be our only way off-world."

Mara's expression sank, and a roll of thunder roared above them. It was almost poetic.

A harsh squeal of metal scraping against metal sounded from the other airlock, and a voice screamed frantically, "GET INSIDE! NOW!"

It took a moment to register, and Michael swore she saw a handprint in the ground that hadn't been there before. The handprint filled with some sort of thick, black liquid, and Mara shrieked beside her. Michael's attention darted toward the other woman, who was staring wide-eyed at the back of her hand.

The voice shouted again, "ARE YOU DEAF? GET IN HERE!"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m kinda flying by the seat of my pants here, so I’ll try to keep this updated as regularly as I can. I like this idea, and this fic is going to be far shorter than Intus Mortuis which will hopefully mean it will come to me easier.


End file.
